Treating a Historic Massacre as an Active Crime Scene

Delve into the books of the Mexican writer and musician Julián Herbert and how obedient — how chaste — so much contemporary nonfiction can suddenly seem in comparison. Does Herbert write memoirs? Essays? Novels? His books are mash-ups of memory, investigation and fictional ornamentation, marked with a fond disrespect for genre — much like life.

Herbert wrote his previous, prizewinning book, “Tomb Song,” in his mother's hospital room, as she lay dying from leukemia. It is as much farce as elegy — his dreamy, druggy interludes vie with deathbed scenes and recollections of a childhood of poverty and abandonment, spent in the brothels where his mother worked, changing her name “with the nonchalance with which other women dye or perm their hair” — Lorena, Vicky, Juana. (The source, I've often thought, of Herbert's comfort with the murk and multiplicity of truth.)

The title was a twist on “cradle song” — a lullaby. Herbert kept vigil over his mother in her final days, her “best-loved and most-hated son.” His new book, like the last, is translated by Christina MacSweeney — one of the great Spanish translators of her generation. It's another kind of tomb song, this time for the motherland. “The House of the Pain of Others” tells the story of a “small genocide” that took place in the city of Torreón, over the course of three days in 1911, during the Mexican Revolution. Three hundred Chinese immigrants were shot and bludgeoned to death in the streets, their corpses mutilated, their belongings, businesses and homes ransacked.

The crime has had a strange afterlife. It has been misunderstood and misrepresented — many of Torreón's inhabitants still blame outsiders, marauding revolutionaries and drug cartels (almost anyone, to avoid their own complicity). But it has never been truly forgotten. Oral and printed versions circulated almost immediately in its wake, and academic studies followed. The story of the massacre “wants to be told,” Herbert writes. “It refuses to die. This book is merely a version of that refusal.”